Let's talk about the specific stages of language development. The first stage
is cooing. Cooing are the first sounds that human babies make, other than
crying. And this happens within the first six months of an infant's life.
Cooing is almost exclusively vowels. So things like ooh, or e, for example.
It's interesting to note that cooing is universal for all babies. Meaning
babies all across the world coo in almost the exact same way. This includes
babies who can hear, as well as babies who are deaf. The next stage is
babbling, babbling occurs after about five or six months of an infant's life.
This is when infants start to experience with different sounds call phoneme.
Phonemes consist of both vowels and consonants. An interesting thing to note
here is that through repeated exposure to their native language, infants start
to prune out sounds that aren't native to their language. They actually lose
the ability to say and perceive non-native language sounds. That's why it can
be so difficult to learn a new language. And after babbling is one word
utterances. This is when babies say things like da-da or mama or the famous no.
Next would be the two word utterances. This happens at around 18 months. But
I'm going to send you to Greg who has a good example of this.